A brief meeting with the Superior and Subordinate Professors yesterday. I was told in no uncertain terms that the Superior Professor was going to “exercise her management authority.” Trouble is, if you have to remind someone of your authority that forcefully, you might not actually have any.
Add to this, the Subordinate Professor was manifesting one of her more annoying tics, where she repeats the last syllable of each word someone says, a half-beat behind. I suppose it gives her the impression she’s following along, but I turned on her yesterday and told her to stop it. For that, I was called “hostile.” Later, it was all I could do not to laugh, as I realized they had no idea what hostile was.
The issue this time is my attendance at an educational program being held in Tacoma next week: being there will require leaving my house at 7 (in the company of the Superior Professor, one of the most inattentive motorists I have had the misfortune to ride with) and getting home Who Knows When. Since I am under a rigid workplan with mandated hours from 9:45 to 6:15, I don’t see how I could take my children to school AND go on this field trip. The Superior Professor’s solution? Public Transport. Um, I never said I didn’t have any way to get there: so how is that a solution?
By my estimates, that would take an hour and a half to two hours each way. So I’d be looking at a 14 hour day or so.
Now, it’s important to understand that someone was already been “volunteered” to take my place since the beginning of this week, so this whole exercise has been about posturing and “exercising management authority.” The workplan that I’m under is not negotiable by me, but can be changed at any time by the Professors. And when I reminded the Superior Professor that she had claimed the workplan was “non-negotiable” she first asked if anyone else was on the room, and then when she learned there were no witnesses, denied having said, adding that that’s the kind of mistake someone not trained in the law would make. I always find insulting people’s intelligence undermines one’s position, but perhaps that’s another artifact of not having been trained in the law.
Ah, one more week. I’m out today per doctor’s orders: I may have a stress fracture in my foot so schlepping all over the building on fool’s errands is not on my agenda.